Rumour: AMD to unleash the Centurion - FX at 5GHz

AMD's focus for the start of this year has been on explaining the virtues of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and driving up gaming interest with the impressive Never Settle bundle, available for most mainstream and high-end Radeon cards.

With attention directed elsewhere, AMD's beleaguered FX processors have, it seems, been consigned to the ash heap of history. These chips do without the baked-in graphics present on APUs and, while perfectly reasonable in their own right, are overshadowed by Intel's third-generation Core 'Ivy Bridge' processors.

So how about this as a rumour for a Friday morning? Though AMD will never go on record and confirm this, we have it on good authority that the chip-maker will soon be releasing a super-FX chip. Based on the same 'Vishera' architecture powering the current FX-8350, which runs at up to 4.2GHz, this new FX, codenamed 'Centurion', is to be made available in very limited quantities.

This so-called Centurion is guaranteed to run at 5GHz, on air, though we don't know exactly what voltage or supporting hardware will be required for this lofty speed.

Here's the kicker; our sources indicate that this limited-edition chip is set to cost a whopping $795 - this is not a typo! Yup, back to the pricing of FX chips of old. Is there any way that you, the readers, can countenance such pricing for an architecture that's been in the doldrums of late? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.

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Certainly interested to see if this requires a certain level of VRM control on the motherboard and what kind of power it guzzles. If they manage to get that kind of power in a sensible TDP it could be a beast of a chip.

benegerton1985My FX6300 cost me £95 and with a small voltage tweak (up from 1.42v to 1.45v) will run at 5GHz. So what's the point?

A whole extra functioning module? ;)

Presumably this is just a carefully farmed top bin of silicon to try to give the brand some halo presence. OTOH, if they can get silicon that's guaranteed to run at 5GHz that's pretty impressive from a manufacturing POV. Limited edition, no doubt with a few extras (possibly a liquid cooling unit in the box?) to entice enthusiast AMD fans (and no, I don't mean fanboys) who want to push FX chips to their limits ... probably worth $800 to a few people, and for a limited edition headline product that's all they need to sell :D